My Experiences with Smartboard and Promethean

Several of the classrooms I've been in on campus have either a Smartboard or a Promethean board, so I've seen them in use many times. I consider myself an expert at observing these types of technology! But as we all well know, simply observing something is pretty much the lowest level of learning. So, I'd love to have some hands-on experience with either the Smartboard or the Promethean board. I think they can be great tools for teaching. However, I do not want to become that teacher that uses such technology in every single lesson. Smartboard and Promethean boards should supplement teaching; they should not take the teacher's place.

I have never had any sort of instruction with the Smartboard, but I did participate in an introductory lesson concerning the Promethean board and its software. I took a tutorial online, then listened to a lecture on how to use the software and the board. While the instructor was demonstrating the use of the Promethean board, I really wanted to try it for myself! I feel like I learned a lot about how to use the technology, but I didn't learn much about what to use it for in the classroom.

In my experience, Smartboards are great tools for teaching skills that involve steps or procedures. The teacher can model skills for the students using the Smartboard so that the students can observe, then practice the skills on their own. For example, Dr. Manning uses a Smartboard in her Assessments class and she goes through the steps of determing assessment values, such as standard deviation, Z-scores, and other things I have yet to understand. By seeing her work out the steps, it helps me better understand the process. Teachers could also use the Smartboard as a tool for teaching editing skills in Language Arts. Similar to the assessment values, editing involves steps. Each step must be clear and understood before a student can move onto the next step. Smartboards are great for teaching steps because they allow the teachers to interact with text on a screen, rather than just presenting it to them.